Letters of Louis MacNeice ed by Jonathan Allison: review

Tom Payne feels a little left out by Louis MacNeice's letters, edited by
Jonathan Allison

Just to get this out of the way: reviewers of letters are obliged at some point to lament the medium’s decline, and to regret that, in an age of email and Twitter, we can no longer expect the kind of afterlife a handwritten note commands. But after reading this selection of letters (at 700 pages, nowhere near the total), I’d have been happy if Louis MacNeice had spent his life emailing. For one thing, we’d have had a richer selection of what his correspondents said. And much of what survives here is fairly businesslike.

It’s a particular shame that we have so few words from two great loves of the poet’s life: Eleanor Clark and Hedli Anderson (who became his wife). Their remarks go to the heart of the man. During one tiff with Clark, MacNeice writes: “I used to have a masochistic instinct to agree with things people said against me but I have given up pretending to agree when I don’t.” But he does later reflect on her view that he shouldn’t yet be writing his memoirs: “Why are you doing a prose book? Why be so prolific?”

MacNeice was extraordinarily prolific – he died at not quite 56 and his Collected Poems run to 800 pages. He was particularly good at the long poem, such as “Autumn Journal”.

Throughout his education, his intellect and flair were obvious to all around him, and this gave him the assurance to relax into the forms he chose: the music of his poems lilts rather than chimes. Similarly, he doesn’t burden his letters with cleverness, even though Cyril Connolly would later recall that he had a double first and that “he could be inclined to make other people feel they hadn’t got these firsts”.

Still, as he admitted later, he did overproduce. There are some treats here, particularly in the long letters to Clark, which reveal a man who is thinking and feeling and writing all at once, in splurging paragraphs. But often these letters are business. There are memos to BBC higher-ups, with insights into, for example, how to cover India without over-celebrating the British legacy; and there are requests to his family to send books, or a tennis racquet press, to wherever in the world he is. He wrote often to T S Eliot, and though these usually contain routine publishing concerns, it’s worth noting that shortly after the war, MacNeice graduates from “Dear Eliot” to “Dear Tom”.

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Glimpses at the poet’s inner life are precious few, but in a couple of exceptional cases, a poem appears in its context, as part of a letter. One, with its refrain, “In a wild country”, is from the eight-year-old Louis; another, the late, piquant “Solitary Travel” comes when the writer and reader can share the frustration of letters arriving from remote but similar parts of the world.

The editor of these letters, Jonathan Allison, has done what he can with the footnotes, supplying Who’s Who-style biographies of the leading characters. These can help with a little gossip, or the identities of schoolmates at Sherborne Prep, as well as who Auden and Eliot are. But they’re most useful for their hints of a world seen at other perspectives than MacNeice’s. You can see why he was so mortified by Clark’s line: “If I had once seen you turn back in the street to read something at a news-stand, or pick up a book that was way off from your field and become engrossed in it, I would fall really in love with you.”

It’s tempting to trust her, although Anderson was surely fairer when remembering her late husband. She likened him to a house, whose “antechamber was full of people coming and going, administrators, doctors, dentists, critics, power men and smooth business agents”. Other rooms become less accessible. There are two bedrooms, one for “the casual lady encounter” and one for “the five ladies of his life”. The reader can sometimes see those withdrawing rooms and sometimes makes it upstairs; but cumulatively, it feels as though we spend a lot of time in the antechamber.

Tom Payne’s Fame: from the Bronze Age to Britney is published by Vintage